journals/book chapters

(accepted). Piña, Manuel & Susan Wolff-Murphy. Troubling "Teaching for Transfer": Turning (Again) to Rhetoric and Process. Composition Forum (anticipated spring 2025).

​

This article examines the complexity with teaching-for-transfer (TFT) as curricular content through a qualitative study of how TFT was experienced by first-year writing students at a regional, Hispanic-Serving public institution. Our analysis of reflective student writing supported previous studies that show that the curriculum supports the knowledge and application (especially in a two-term sequence) of key concepts of writing studies, including rhetoric, audience, genre, and process. We advocate for re-focusing on the process and rhetorical foundations of TFT, given the constraints of students’ experiences, beliefs, and interests; existing post-COVID, high-stakes testing environment of K-12 schools; and long-standing inequities in labor conditions for our faculty.

​

Piña, Manuel & Andrew Hollinger. (2023). The Backchannel: A Re/Turn to Digital Communities. CCTE Studies, 88, 64-71.

​

This article provides a novel theorization of what community-building means—and how it might happen—in digitally mediated teaching and learning environments. We argue for the value in understanding community through a distributed (read: non-human), non-institutionalized lens. We begin by re/turning the definition/s of the backchannel; we then theorize about the instructional and professional values of the backchannel using autoethnographic narratives drawn from our time as doctoral students in a fully online, synchronous graduate program. Finally, we conclude by drawing attention to implications and problems and potentials of our theorization of the backchannel.

​

Piña, Manuel. (2023). (Re)turning to Hypertext: Mattering Digital Learning Spaces. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 53 (2), 153-171.

​

This essay argues for a (re)turn to the potential of hypertext by entangling it with/in material rhetorics. A (re)turning—turning over again—troubles and decolonizes traditional understandings of hypertext as either technological product or trope by demonstrating how hypertextuality is [also] a matter of matter. More specifically, this essay uses ethnography as “deep theorization” to extend Angela Haas’s notion of wampum-as-hypertext. I analyze the hypertextual rhetoricity of matter in students’ digital learning environments and demonstrate how these places iteratively become agential and transformative, thus (re)making the digital learning experience. This theorization of digital-learning-spaces-as-hypertexts draws attention to the need to (re) conceptualize digital spaces in terms beyond that of efficiency and carefully (re)consider what it means to [better] teach with/in digitally mediated environments. 

Piña, Manuel & Andrew Hollinger.(2023). "Light and the Quantum Physics of WPA Work." In L. Wilkes, L. Mina, & P. Poblete (Eds.) Toward More Sustainable Metaphors of Writing Program Administration (pp. 49-65). Utah State UP. 

​

In this chapter, we re/frame the work of writing program administration through the quantum theory of complementarity and how it works to explains the dual—and seemingly contradictory—nature of light. As young WPAs who occupy strikingly similar positions at different institutions (a large public research university and a small private liberal arts university), we daily feel the full weight of our professional experiences that are at once both parallel and divergent. Using autoethnographic inquiry methods from our dual (both/and) positions, we theorize the ways in which WPA work is, like the properties of quantum light, both emergent and entangled.

​

Piña, Manuel. (2021). Extending Informed Self-Placement: The Case for Students' Dispositions. Xchanges, 16 (1). 

​

This article calls for the revision and extension of current informed self-placement models in order to account for students’ dispositions. Placement decisions about writing courses are ultimately an act of knowledge transfer, and as such, dispositions bear great relevance. I argue placement instruments (specifically directed and informed self-placement) neglect to fully realize the complexity and consequence students are faced with when making this decision. Moreover, our research study confirms that (self-)placement decisions are highly influenced by students’ prior dispositions. Using character composites drawn from interview and focus group participants, I identify two dispositional habituses students might embody: liminal and linear. I explore how these dispositional embodiments affect not only students’ decisions about placement but also their continued relevance in students’ academic performance in university writing courses. As the first contact that students have with writing in higher education settings, I contend that students’ decisions would be better supported if placement instruments were conceived of and made with due attention to dispositional factors.

​

Piña, Manuel. (2020). Who Cares if Johnny Writes With a Pencil? Or, a Hauntological Historiography of Materiality in Composition-Rhetoric. Rhetoric Review, 39 (2), 188-201.

​

Composition-rhetoric is experiencing a surge in research examining how the material is rhetorically consequential, sometimes termed new materialism. However, much of this research is future-oriented, leaving intact traditional disciplinary values. This article offers a hauntological re-reading of our disciplinary history from a materialist perspective wherein we are always-already material. By examining three canonical articles where the original research is haunted by the rhetoricity of matter, the field’s traditional history and, concomitantly, current-future identities are left radically open and unsettled. New adjacent possibilities are available for realization only if/when we render our past-present-future selves unfamiliar.

​